'Fluid As Mood and Ponderous As Grief'

Winter 2001-02. Upstate New York. Much snow, few thaws. We discarded our Christmas tree at the curb and awaited pickup by the city. Passing plows buried the castoff repeatedly and I added to the heap by shoveling out the driveway. By early spring, the tree was frozen under ten or twelve feet of ice and snow. My middle son was then about eighteen months old, and I had promised him we would dig snow tunnels. We used garden trowels to carve out a passage wide enough for him to disappear, and uncovered the perfectly preserved Christmas tree – in March or April, I think. The needles were still green and not falling off. Michael, bundled in a puffy red ski jacket, snow pants and blue stocking cap, was dizzy and red-faced with excitement and the cold. In family lore, that became, like a folk or fairy tale, “The Year We Celebrated Christmas Twice.” It all came back with Maryann Corbett’s “Ice Dam” in the December 2020 issue of Anglican Theological Review: 

“The airiness of snow’s accumulation

in powdery upheapings on the roof

swansdown-swaddled us through a muffled winter.

Only now, in the first whispers of March,

does the truth dribble down walls on the upstairs porch

with the full weight of what was always water,

fluid as mood and ponderous as grief,

an oozing, seeping, weepy accusation.

Now the recriminations; now we search

for scapegoats (insulation? fan? blocked gutter?)

but find there is no bargain-rate salvation.

This costs. Somebody has to risk his life.

The checkbook bleeds again. Abashed and bitter,

we beat our breasts for what was left undone.”

 

In the North, ice and snow are beautiful and dangerous, as well as memory-encouraging. When digging out the Christmas tree with Michael, I self-consciously told myself to preserve this memory, to keep it intact and unchanging like the tree. And so I have.

 

In an interview, Nabokov once described himself as “a one-man multitude,” which might serve to characterize any good writer. He imaginatively projects himself into a thousand characters, the past and future, alternative universes. In one of his finest stories, “A Guide to Berlin” p(Russian, 1925; English, 1976), he speculates about the creation of memories and the possibility of willing ourselves into the memories of others. The narrator says of a little boy he sees eating soup in the kitchen of a café: “How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody’s future recollection?”